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Seven Languages in print; PragPub November Issue

November 03, 2010

Want to become a better programmer? Learning a new programming language will show you new ways of thinking, and new approaches to problem solving that will help you be a better programmer in any language. And what if you could learn the important lessons from seven different languages? You’d be unstoppable.

Seven Languages in Seven Weeks

Ruby, Io, Prolog, Scala, Erlang, Clojure, Haskell. With Seven Languages in Seven Weeks, by Bruce A. Tate, you’ll go beyond the syntax—and beyond the 20-minute tutorial you’ll find someplace online. This book has an audacious goal: to present a meaningful exploration of seven languages within a single book. Seven Languages hits what’s essential and unique about each language and helps teach you how to grok new languages.

For each language, you’ll solve a nontrivial problem using techniques that show off that language’s most important features. You’ll discover the strengths and weaknesses of each language, while dissecting the process of learning languages quickly—for example, finding the typing and programming models, decision structures, and how you interact with them.

Among this group of seven, you’ll explore the most critical programming models of our time. Learn the dynamic typing that makes Ruby, Python, and Perl so flexible and compelling. Understand the underlying prototype system that’s at the heart of JavaScript. See how pattern matching in Prolog shaped the development of Scala and Erlang. Discover how pure functional programming in Haskell is different from the Lisp family of languages, including Clojure.

Explore the concurrency techniques that are quickly becoming the backbone of a new generation of Internet applications. Find out how to use Erlang’s let-it-crash philosophy for building fault-tolerant systems. Understand the actor model that drives concurrency design in Io and Scala. Learn how Clojure uses versioning to solve some of the most difficult concurrency problems.

It’s all here, all in one place. Use the concepts from one language to find creative solutions in another—or discover a language that may become one of your favorites.

November PragPub

November’s PragPub magazine is packed with information about PragProWriMo and more.

If you’re old enough to remember Byte magazine from its heyday, or more recently, Apple Directions magazine from Apple’s developer support program, you know Gregg Williams. He introduced Byte readers to the IBM PC and the Apple Macintosh and the Commodore Amiga, and his writing in Apple Directions was the true technical voice of that publication. Lately he’s gotten into Clojure, and this month he shares with us his experience with that JVM-based Lisp dialect.

Our columnists cover a wide range this month. Andy Hunt writes about estimating and how constraints foster ingenuity. Jonathan Rasmusson writes about production readiness. Mike Swaine rambles on about the ebb and flow of writing. And John Shade follows the advice of Jonathan Swift.

In an information-packed interview, Pragmatic Bookshelf managing editor Susannah Pfalzer talks about what it’s like to write a book for the Bookshelf. Chris McMahon writes in this issue about software development as performance. Agile In a Flash authors Jeff Langr and Tim Ottinger discuss the Japanese martial arts concept of Shuhari and how it applies to agile development. And Dan Wohlbruck is back with another tech history article, this time looking at the history of radio.

And of course we do the wheat/chaff triage thing on the tweets we follow in Choice Bits, and we report on all the good stuff coming up in our Calendar.